Brand vs. Generic: Physicians Weigh In

The costs of keeping people healthy, or at least alive and out of the hospital, continue to grow. Whether it's another percentage point of GDP, another out-of-pocket catastrophe for a patient, or simply a rise in monthly health insurance premiums, everyone gets stuck with the bill.

Surely generic utilization is an important element of any cost-saving scheme, since patients get the same medicine for a fraction of the price. Developed nations as a whole – defined by IMS Health as the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Canada and South Korea – reduced their medicine spending for the first time in 2012, in part due to stronger regulatory rules promoting generic substitution, according to a recent IMS Health report.

In a separate report published last month, ProPublica authors Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber wondered why US Medicare is "wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by failing to look into doctors who disproportionately prescribe brand-name drugs." To find out why generics sometimes aren't being prescribed when they're available, Ornstein and Weber asked the prescribers themselves. Below is a selection of those responses, published by the authors' permission.